The popularity of the subject of moral agency is not hard to explain. It raises questions that are central to understanding ourselves as moral beings: What is moral agency? How did we acquire our capacities to act as moral agents? How do we put these capacities to work? What makes for justified true moral beliefs, proper moral motivation, and successful moral action? In his recently re-issued 1998 book, The Biology and Psychology of Moral Agency, William Rottschaeffer offers an early attempt to bring current scientific findings to bear on these issues. He does so by taking up these questions from a "scientific naturalist" orientation, i.e., with the operative assumption that "moral agency is a phenomenon best understood with the help of the sciences." (ix) Rottschaeffer's preferred form of scientific naturalism is integrationism, which rejects the view that science is irrelevant to or in conflict with ethics, and holds instead that there are substantial connections between the two. Developing this version of naturalism, he leaves behind religious and purely a priori approaches to moral philosophy. Instead, following Sellars in the pursuit of a synoptic vision of the manifest and scientific images, he aims to develop a theory of moral agency that can incorporate the latest findings in evolutionary biology, psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, sociology and economics. Realizing the impossibility of addressing all these fields, however, the inquiry is limited to biology and psychology.

The goal of the book, then, is to articulate a philosophically defensible model of moral agency that is supported by biology and psychology. This model is composed of the following four functional levels (the first of which Rottschaeffer sees as a corrective to the over-intellectualized accounts of Harry Frankfurt and Gary Watson): "(1) a base level, constituted by evolutionarily acquired and behaviorally learned capacities and tendencies that incline the agent to act morally in given situations; (2) a behavioral level, consisting of a set of moral beliefs and desires that are the immediate sources of actions, and that are influenced by both base-level and higher-level components; (3) a reflective level, composed of higher-level beliefs and desires, including moral norms or their equivalents, that influence the behavioral-level beliefs and desires; and (4) a self-referentiallevel, containing conceptions of the self, including the self as a moral agent, that motivate the use of moral norms and, indirectly, moral action." (20)

This model will no doubt appeal to those sympathetic to scientific naturalism. As mentioned, the naturalist agenda gives pride of place to the empirical sciences. In Rottschaeffer's view, these sciences: provide the information necessary for making moral decisions at applied and normative levels; describe and explain human moral capacities, both their acquisition and their maintenance, as well as their operation; provide some bases for moral norms; furnish accounts of the justification of moral beliefs, motivations and action, as well as a theory about moral realities; enable a critique of alternative accounts of ethics, for instance, commonsense or folk psychologically based ethics, as well as reductionism and eliminativism; and address questions of the meaning of ethics.

In implementing his naturalist methodological principle, Rottschaeffer carefully builds his case in each of the targeted areas. In answering the question about the source of the moral capacity, he draws upon fairly standard evolutionary thinking, attempting to exploit insights of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology. Addressing the question of the faculty's post-birth development, he borrows (though not uncritically) from psychologist Martin Hoffman's four-leveled account of empathic development. Skinnerian behaviorism is considered as a leading candidate for explaining how we come to learn moral values, but is found (along with sociobiology) not only to be inadequate to the four-tiered model, but also scientifically unjustified. This defect of behaviorism is, to some extent, remedied by incorporating developments from the cognitive revolution in psychology, specifically Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory of agency. Addressing the justification of moral beliefs, Rottschaeffer turns to naturalized epistemology. On the meta-ethical question of the ontology of value, he embraces moral realism, taking special care to combat worries about the naturalistic fallacy. By the end of the study, Rottschaeffer has toured us through some of the (then) most current and best supported empirical theories and woven them into a coherent overall account of moral agency.

The book devotes a great deal of space to biology and psychology, of course, but readers might be surprised to learn that no substantive philosophical discussion emerges until the fourth and final part of the book (around page 190). This means that it is not a typical academic philosophy text. Prospective readers who might have been scared off by thinking that it was might want to re-think approaching the book. Still, there are over eighty pages of more-or-less pure philosophy and for this stretch readers should be aware of the high degree of rigor. (Also contributing to the challenge of reading the book is Rottschaeffer's penchant for lengthy paragraphs, which often exceed thirty lines of text and sometimes surpass forty.) Consequently, the book will probably not be productively read in lower division classes. But it should be quite valuable for upper division and graduate courses. A couple features of the book make this so. First, as suggested above, Rottschaeffer sets a good model for careful philosophical thinking and scientific speculation: characteristically, he offers moderate claims, few surprises, and seldom takes himself to be offering knock-down arguments; he tries out leads, such as behaviorism, and goes with them until they are clearly unworkable; and he never lets the desire to work out the overall view lead him too quickly to his conclusions. Second, the book does deliver on the promise to provide a synoptic vision: making clear the range of relevant questions, all the main ones are dealt with and their systematic relations are made apparent. Thus, Rottschaeffer avoids falling into the trap common to many analytic philosophers: precision in a narrow range but at the expense of the bigger picture. This broader perspective will be valuable to students embarking on the subject for the first time, and the book will profitably be used in classes as an orienting text in conjunction with more specialized treatments of the various subject areas.

The downside of Rottschaeffer's careful way of proceeding combined with his large-scale ambition is that the account remains to some significant degree programmatic.

This feature of the book will probably not be lost on philosophers not already in general agreement; they will likely not be moved by relatively brief treatments of philosophical topics, such as moral realism, that have received a tremendous amount of attention for many years. This is an inevitable outcome of the kind of book Rottschaeffer has written and, in this reviewer's opinion, not something to hold against him, given the carefully qualified task he has set himself and largely succeeded at.

The popularity of the subject of moral psychology today means that Rottschaeffer's book now has good quality, current competition, e.g., the work of Franz deWaal and Michael Ruse, and the recent three volume set on moral psychology edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstong, to name but a few. Readers interested in this area should make themselves conversant with these works, but Rottschaeffer's book should not be overlooked as the new scholarship proceeds. It is well deserving of attention.

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